3: Dan Romero - Why Information Should Flow on Protocols

Dan Romero (Farcaster, X, Website) is the CEO and co-founder of Farcaster, an open Twitter/X-like social network protocol built on blockchain rails. Before co-founding Farcaster in 2020, Dan previously worked at Coinbase as a Vice President, among many other roles. He joined the company as the 20th employee in 2014 and left in 2019. He's thought about and used Twitter-like networks for nearly two decades and is passionate about open information flow, market-enabled progress, and individual freedom. Timestamps: (01:39): We were promised flying cars and all we got was 140 characters (8:48): Bring Your Own Algorithm (BYOA), RSS, Elon, and The News Channel-ification of Social Networks (35:54): The Field of Dreams Fallacy: If You Build It, It Doesn't Mean They'll Come [Farcaster & Crypto-Focused Section Begins] (44:25): Status as a Service and Building the Home for Crypto Status (55:03): What is Farcaster? (59:34): Why not counter-position against Elon? (01:03:42): Programmable social and “Open APIs” (1:14:22): The Future of Farcaster (1:18:01): Farcaster's Value Capture (1:25:01): Sufficient Decentralization (1:28:44): Why Dan has created NFTs but not tokens [Farcaster & Crypto Focus Ends] (1:29:53): Product Market Fit, Focus, and The Idea Maze (1:37:01): Dan's career arc, contrarian paths, distributed systems, and creative destruction (01:44:09): Coinbase: pre-2017 learnings, hypergrowth, comparisons between building a culture and social network, and anti-lessons (1:49:20): Brian Armstrong and fostering repeatable innovation (1:52:24): What do you wish Balaji [Srinivasan] could work on? (1:53:20): Group Chats and the pendulum between private and public discourse (01:58:55): Power: Elon, Zuck, Trump? (2:00:24): Politics, Populism, Going Direct, and the Podcast Era (2:08:48): What have you changed your mind on this year? (2:10:22): Final Questions Full transcript. Links & Resources RSS+ by Dan Romero The Rise and Demise of RSS by Sinclair Target Status as a Service (StaaS) by Eugene Wei The idea maze by Chris Dixon Balaji Srinivasan's paper on the idea maze The only thing that matters by Marc Andreessen v2 frames FC AI/zk trends